So, don’t I know the rule by now? If you wake up from a bad dream, you never, ever go back to sleep – because the next dream will be worse. By all means, attempt to return to slumber in the case of interrupted dreams of phantasm Lovers, or hit snooze to avoid your mundane employer – but if your dreams are nightmares of horror and distress, don’t let the pillow capture your skull again.
Last night was decent enough – Hell, we played the Funk Box – and that’s always awesome. I didn’t bother to bring my effects pedal because I Love the way my guitar sounds through their sound system. I’m still not sure if it’s the sound guy’s aesthetic or just the way the system’s set up, but some one Loves bass, and I Love it too, and my guitar – and for that matter – my whole band just sounds so MASSIVE and full there. And the audience Loved us. It sounded so large! Imagine my horror when I finally went and looked at the numbers for the night and realized we’d only had a draw of 18! Ouch.
I can tell myself that that’s not too bad for a Tuesday night before Thanksgiving on a week’s notice. But on the otherhand…
But we did well. I’ve really got to thank Liz – she went around pushing the mailing list, and the returns on that were massive. So, thank you thank you Liz, I hope you’ll be willing to do that again. And not that she’ll ever read this, but I also DO have to thank our sometimes agent, Diana of Moore Music, who landed us our Funk Box gigs. I feel bad disappointing her, perhaps. I don’t know how hard she works on getting us gigs – I think we actually tend to be much more of a last-minute choice, it seems. But someday I hope to turn that around.
And of course, huge thanks to everyone who came out. There’s pictures later on – thanks to my parents for coming out to a smokey bar (I hope you had a good time despite that) and thanks to Heather’s parents for coming out (and Mara for taking pictures… more of those later on).
So, a good night on that front. Had an early load-in, which meant an early (and easy) sound check – I like dealing with professionals. i.e. – the other band was on time (despite being from New York!), the venue opened it’s doors to us on time, the sound guy was there on time, we were there on time – professional! Even as the opening band, we got a thorough sound check – everything was smooooth like baby ass. We had time left over to run and get sushi, and that was good too.
Sushi, Funk Box – lots of friends AT the Funk Box… parking ticket. Fucking Hell. Second fucking parking ticket in a week.
But, that won’t get me down.
Because everything was professional, and everything started on time, we got out on time, and I LOVE getting out of a venue at 11pm on a weekday. We got home, I ate lasagna, and eventually turned in. Sleep was long in coming, so I took it out on Heather in the form of a giggling pillow fight. Quite nice. Rambled about quarks and the brush strokes of God to lull her back into complacency, but then fell asleep before I could take advantage of that complacency with another darkness-stealthed night attack.
I woke up this morning at 9.30am. That’s a rarity. Almost an obscenity. I no longer believe in the AM as morning – it’s the second half of night. Rain and mist had filtered the morning light into a grey murk that did nothing to dispel the cobwebs of dreaming. In my head there were still air-raid sirens and destruction.
A (perhaps surprisingly) a-typical dream of science fiction monstrosities had stalked through my head, rampaging over the Earth, destroying cities. I remember that Heather and I were hidden in ruins, watching things disintegrate. Trying to survive a nuclear winter while still justifying the guitars strapped to the top of the car. Moving inland away from where the extra-terrestrial wrought terror lies. Packing friends into the car, rearranging the gig baggage so we can fit four people in the mighty post-Apocolyptic Saturn. (Don’t know why we couldn’t get rid of the gig baggage).
And I woke up out of that to hear the reassuring sound of traffic outside. Muffled by the damp, but amplified in it’s way by the car-tire swishing that I still somehow associate with my Grandmother’s old yellow house on it’s hill in Pennsylvania.
Lulled into a sense of security, I failed to resist the warmth temptation of the bed, rolled over, and dreamt Holocaust dreams.
Living so frequently in a Jewish household, having just been to the Spy Museum where so many exhibits were devoted to the fight against Hitler, having just seen a stage version of Anne Frank’s diary…. maybe these things somehow all coagulated in my head this morning.
Hiding Heather for what seemed like months, and people accusing me of “smelling like a Jew”. I tried to at least walk the streets with Rowan in this modern day version of World War II – but we got thrown out of a pizza joint, the owner yelling that Rowan was “darkening his doorstep” – the police were called and we were running through slush that dragged at our footsteps.
Dressed in rags, there wasn’t much any place to go. Everyone knew. I remember the house being ripped apart, chains and whips. Heather being beaten down in the street and my usually monochromatic dreams took great advantage of the melodramatic red blood on snow imagery.
I finally woke up out of that – everything warm and quiet and serene. Grey outside, still drizzling murk. This time I knew it was time to get the fuck up.
